The Scenario
You are a PPC strategist at a performance marketing agency. Campaign planning is next Monday. You have 40 high-value keywords in column A of a Google Sheet, the list your client approved last week. Before you build ad groups, you need to know who is advertising on each keyword, what their ad copies look like, and whether they have been at it long enough to have a real budget behind it.
It is Wednesday.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Semrush's Advertising Research tool and type in keyword one
- You screenshot the competitor ad table, note the domain and headline
- You switch to the Ad History tab and check how many months they have been advertising
- You repeat this for all 40 keywords, accumulating a document of screenshots and notes
- You paste everything into a spreadsheet manually, realize you forgot four keywords, and start over
- You hand the client a deck built on 32 of 40 keywords with inconsistent data formats.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the keyword list and pulls the paid search competitor data from Semrush for each keyword, writing it into a structured table ready for campaign planning.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each keyword in column A, fetch the top 5 paid search advertisers from Semrush and write their domain, ad position, and ad title into new rows on a PPC Competitors sheet. Include a Keyword column so I can filter by keyword.
SheetXAI pulls competitor ad data for all 40 keywords and assembles the PPC Competitors tab with up to 200 rows, all attributed to their keyword.
What You Get
A PPC Competitors tab with:
- Column A — Keyword — the target keyword from your list
- Column B — AdvertiserDomain — the domain running ads
- Column C — AdPosition — their average or current ad position
- Column D — AdTitle — the headline Semrush has observed
Up to 5 competitors per keyword, all 40 keywords covered in one operation. You can now pivot by advertiser to see which domains advertise across the most of your target keywords — that is your real competitive set.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
PPC research gets messy when the data needs more context.
When you want ad descriptions as well as ad titles
Headlines alone do not show the full creative strategy. You need the description line too.
For each keyword in column A, fetch the top 5 paid advertisers from Semrush and write domain, position, ad title, and ad description into new rows on the PPC Competitors sheet with a Keyword column.
When you only want advertisers who have been running for 3+ months
A competitor who started ads last month may be testing. One who has been running for 6 months has committed budget. You want the committed ones.
For each keyword in column A, fetch the top 5 paid advertisers from Semrush. Only include advertisers whose ad history shows 3 or more months of activity. Write domain, position, ad title, and months active into the PPC Competitors sheet.
When you want to group keywords by the competitors who dominate them
You want to know which advertiser owns the most keywords on your list, not just who appears on any given one.
After building the PPC Competitors sheet, create a summary in a new tab called AdvertiserSummary. For each unique advertiser domain, write the number of keywords from column A they appear in, and list those keywords in a Keywords column. Sort by keyword count descending.
When the full campaign brief needs competitor data, creative patterns, and a strategic note in one pass
Your client wants to know the competitive landscape before approving the keyword list.
For each keyword in column A, pull the top 5 paid advertisers from Semrush including domain, position, ad title, ad description, and months active. Write into the PPC Competitors sheet with a Keyword column. Then in a new StrategicNotes tab, write one sentence per keyword describing the competitive intensity: how many active advertisers, whether any have been there 6+ months, and whether the top ad title suggests a price-based or feature-based message.
The pattern: the data pull, the analysis, and the competitive context for the brief all come from one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and put your target keywords in column A, then ask it to pull the paid search competitor data from Semrush. The Semrush integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For a related workflow, see how to pull organic competitor lists from Semrush or the Semrush in Google Sheets overview.